Dr. Helen

Commentary on popular culture and society, from a (mostly) psychological perspective

Saturday, May 09, 2009

Has your marriage been affected by the recession?

PJTV is looking for those of you out there whose marriage has been affected by the recession. Are you working more or less during the recession and is this putting a strain on your marriage? Is your wife picking up more of the load and resentful? Or is your husband unhappy about the stress in the family budget? Does this article reflect your experience or is it something different? Let us know!

Friday, May 08, 2009

The Road to Serfdom

We are on it. I saw on Instapundit that today is F.A. Hayek's birthday. I am in the middle of reading his book, The Road to Serfdom and I wish so very much I had read this earlier in life. I took several economics classes in college but didn't read this book, I think they told us to read Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto. Pity.

Are liberal comedians cowards or just partisan hacks?

I was channel surfing last night and came upon George Lopez doing this comedy act from 2007. I was appalled when I heard him cursing President Bush with the F word for his decisions on immigration. The curse words flew and of course, his audience was eating it up. Lopez was unhappy with Bush's stance on immigration. Okay, fair enough. But what if he was unhappy with something Obama did, would he dare curse Obama directly using the F word as he did Bush? No way, and he knows it.

That's what some comics - citing the scarcity of satire directed at President Obama and his administration - want to know.

Claiming that his peers are "panicky" about "being called a racist," stand-up legend Jackie Mason said too many once-fearless satirists are settling for "hero worship" of the new U.S. president.

The Great Presidential Comedy Drought of 2009 can't be chalked off to a lack of satirical fodder, said comic Jeffrey Jena, founder of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy blog. ("Looking at politics and life from the right side," proclaims its motto.)

"Letterman used to do a 'Bushism of the Week.' " Why hasn't he started one with Obama?" Mr. Jena said. "There's plenty of those moments, the 'Ohs, and 'Umms' or 'I don't speak Austrian.' "

Radio and Fox News Channel talk show host Glenn Beck, who kicks off a six-city stand-up comedy tour on June 1 in Denver, suggested that both fear and political calculation are inhibiting factors. Comedians like Mr. Letterman are "either afraid, or they know the power of comedy as a weapon and they like using it as that," he said.

So, coward or political hack, take your pick. Either way, neither speaks well of the character of these comedians or the people behind the major entertainment shows who refuse to give other views a chance to be heard.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Deadbeat Dads show back--now on Lifetime

As if Lifetime television doesn't portray men as villains enough already, now Glenn Sacks has emailed about the new Deadbeat Dad show (it was the "Bad Dads" show that Fox dropped) that the station has picked up, just to twist the knife a little deeper:

Lifetime TV announced the launch of its new, father-bashing reality show Deadbeat Dads last week, and Lifetime received several thousand protest letters, calls and faxes last week. This week we take our protest to the Hearst Corporation, which owns much of Lifetime TV.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Deadbeat Dads, originally developed at Fox, follows National Child Support founder Jim Durham as he tracks down and confronts dads who don’t pay child support.” According to Reuters, Durham “functions as a sort of ‘Dog the Bounty Hunter’ for tracking deadbeats…It’s ambush reality TV.” Durham will target fathers who are behind on their child support by “making their lives miserable — foreclosing on their house, repossessing their car. He will squeeze them.”

Last April, Fathers & Families led a highly-publicized campaign against the show (originally called “Bad Dads”) and got Fox to drop it. Now Lifetime TV, which reaches nearly 100 million households, has picked up Deadbeat Dads, which unfairly depicts divorced fathers as uncaring and selfish. Research clearly shows that most divorced dads pay their child support and remain a part of their children’s lives, often under difficult circumstances. In fact, federal government data shows that the overwhelming majority of “deadbeat dads” earn poverty level wages–only 4% earn even $40,000 a year.

"One day it's empowerment when it suits their purposes and the next day it's exploitation."

Marc Rudov, the author of The Man's No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth was on O'Reilly last night talking about bikini moms like Valerie Bertinelli. He makes some very good points about how women, on the one hand, want to show off their bodies and on the other, say they are exploited by men. "They exploit themselves," he states. "One day it's empowerment when it suits their purposes and the next day it's exploitation."

Monday, May 04, 2009

The Spanking Controversy

A Newsweek article this week has a story about a school in South Carolina whose principal is using spanking as a form of discipline and is getting good results:

Before Nixon took over "John C," student behavior had gotten so bad that one teacher described it as "chaos." She eventually quit in disgust, pulled her own child from the school, and moved to a different one 45 minutes away. John C is located in a rural stretch of South Carolina near the Georgia border where all but one of the major textile plants have closed, and where the leading local employer is the school system. Nearly 90 percent of the kids at John C live below the poverty line. When Nixon went to his first PTO meeting, only about a dozen parents showed up at a school with 226 students. He still has trouble reaching many families by phone because they can't afford to put down a deposit on a landline. And yet Nixon has managed to turn John C around. It recently earned three statewide Palmetto awards, one for academic performance and two for overall improvement—the school's first such honors in its 35-year history. Not everyone agrees with his methods, but most parents and teachers will tell you he couldn't have pulled off such a turnaround without his wooden paddle.

The studies cited by opponents of corporal punishment, Dr. Baumrind contended, often do not adequately distinguish the effects of spanking, as practiced by nonabusive parents, from the impact of severe physical punishment and abuse. Nor do they consider other factors that might account for problems later in life, like whether parents are rejecting or whether defiant or aggressive children might be more likely to be spanked in the first place.

Dr. Baumrind described findings from her own research, an analysis of data from a long-term study of more than 100 families, indicating that mild to moderate spanking had no detrimental effects when such confounding influences were separated out. When the parents who delivered severe punishment -- for example, frequently spanking with a paddle or striking a child in the face -- were removed from the analysis, Dr. Baumrind and her colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Owens, found that few harmful effects linked with spanking were left. And the few that remained could be explained by other aspects of the parent-child relationship.

''When parents are loving and firm and communicate well with the child,'' Dr. Baumrind said, ''the children are exceptionally competent and well adjusted, whether or not their parents spanked them as preschoolers.''

The principal in the South Carolina school may use a paddle but he does not use it "frequently," and he does seem to have a consistent pattern of using corporal punishment. Parents are also brought into the equation and seem to be working with the principal toward expecting better behavior. This seems to me to be a help and not a hindrance to the kids in this town.